Clement loves being in the shadows
The Conchords star is torn between writing and acting most of the time, but boredom feeds his creativity, he tells Luaine Lee.
Jemaine Clement can’t make up his mind. The New Zealand actor-writer is best known as one of the hilarious cogs in the comedy series Flight of the Conchords.
While he and co-creator Bret McKenzie starred in the show, Clement is torn, he says.
‘‘When I’m writing I always want to be acting and when I’m acting I always want to be writing.’’
The conflict arises from Clement’s personality. Half-timid mouse and half-loquacious lion, he admits he’s shy deep down. ‘‘If I say that I’m shy, my friends find that ridiculous,’’ he says.
‘‘They say, ‘You’re one of the least shy people I’ve ever met!’ But it’s how you perceive yourself,’’ he says.
‘‘I guess I’m confident in some ways. It doesn’t bother me to get in front of hundreds of people unless I don’t know what to say, unless I haven’t thought of what I’m going to say.
‘‘I love to write for a while,’’ he laughs. ‘‘Acting’s way more fun, but there’s something satisfying [about] creating characters and when you see them walking around and they improvise and they’ve got enough from the script to become a person. I like that.’’
His new comedy series, What We
Do in the Shadows, premieres on Sky TV’s SoHo2 channel on March 28. It’s the tale of three frustrated vampires living in the nether depths of Staten Island and coping with their misfit problems.
Clement saw himself a misfit growing up.
‘‘I was pretty quiet, wasn’t very good at sports,’’ he recalls. ‘‘I remember once having to represent the school in running. That was my worst nightmare. And New Zealand is very sportsoriented. In America people like to watch it, but in New Zealand they play it. Everyone plays a sport, yeah. And I didn’t enjoy that,’’ says Clement.
‘‘What I didn’t like about sports mainly, ironically, was working with a group. I didn’t like that you all had to do the same thing. I really hated that. I see the same in my son. Now I have to work with 100 people on the same thing, but I enjoy it now. But I didn’t like what the nerdy kids were supposed to do. I didn’t like Dungeons & Dragons or anything like that.’’
Always an outlier, he observes, ‘‘Individualism is encouraged in America. All the books you see in the airport are self-help books, how to succeed. And New Zealand is not like that. It’s more like blending in. I didn’t want to blend in’’.
His mum, who worked in a cheese factory and raised him, was on to him early.
‘‘My mum always used to say two things to me: ‘You always want
to stand out. And you always want to be like everyone else’. And they were both true.’’
Clement, 45, landed his first job at 11 as a pin-setter in a bowling alley. He also worked for an uncle assembling computers, was a doorto-door salesman pitching orange juice and began writing commercials for radio stations while still in school.
He met co-writers Taika Waititi and McKenzie at university (though Clement never finished). Fresh out of school, the three of them tried to land some kind of work in show business.
‘‘We all put in pictures for shows, but we could never get through,’’ he says. ‘‘We’d do theatre, but you have to do it a lot to live off. You’ve got to put on a lot of shows and people have got to come.’’
At this point, he considered quitting. ‘‘Eventually, I was thinking of doing advertising. I was writing for advertising. Then it just all suddenly took off all at once. Bret and I got a live show in America, a special. At the same time, Taika was nominated for an Oscar [for his two short films], and it all happened within a week! We’d all been totally poor – all of a sudden from trying to scrounge for money, suddenly people wanted us to make stuff.’’
They’ve been ‘‘making stuff’’ ever since.
He’s been married to actress Miranda Manasiadis for 11 years, and they have a 10-year-old son.
Boredom helps feed his creative impulses, he thinks.
‘‘Have a walk, have a bath, and get bored,’’ he says. ‘‘I always think I want a big holiday, that I want a vacation, and two weeks into the vacation, I start emailing people: ‘Let’s try and make something’.’’ What We Do in the Shadows debuts on SoHo2 at 7.30pm on Thursday.
We’d all been totally poor – all of a sudden from trying to scrounge for money, suddenly people wanted us to make stuff.
Jemaine Clement